The Informers

III. THE LIFE ACCORDING TO SARA GUTERMAN

Christmas 1946. Well, not the twenty-fourth, but just a couple of days before. Almost exactly forty-five years ago, imagine, and I'm not one to dwell on anniversaries. Nothing odd in remembering a date like that, do you think? Everybody remembers things that happen at Christmas, and so do I, even though in my house we didn't celebrate the same things or on the same days. But Mama always paid a lot of attention to Christmas, partly, I think, because she wanted to blend in with her new country, the whole recent-arrival complex. When in Rome, et cetera. It would be odd if I did forget the date, even for a second, or if I couldn't remember exactly what happened that day, what I was wearing, what was in the newspapers. The problem is that I remember what happened the day before and the day after, a month before and a month after, because it was a very unusual period, and even as I was living through it I realized my life was changing. To witness the moment when your life changes forever is a very strange thing, I swear. And I have it here in my head, it's like a film that I can't turn off, that I've seen a thousand times. Sometimes I'd like to turn off the film, lose it forever. But then I think: I can't do that to Gabriel. When it was obvious that he was going to forget it all, that his intention was to erase his part in the film come hell or high water, I thought I would become his memory, the idiotic idea of being someone else's memory occurred to me and stayed stuck in my head. Now you can go down to the corner and buy memory, right? At least my grandchildren have. They get a taxi and go to the computer shop and buy memory-I'm sure you've done it, too-I don't even know what a computer is, I haven't wanted to learn, and asking my grandchildren how these things work is to subject myself to their impatience. So anyway, I was Gabriel's memory, although I couldn't talk about that to anybody. I was and maybe still am such a terrible thing: a memory forbidden from admitting that it remembers. My sons don't let me remember either. I'm not allowed to speak to my grandchildren about what happened in those years. I thought about that just a little while ago, I'd never realized: I've gone through life heeding people who forbid me to remember; is that not the strangest thing in the world? So the film in my head ended up existing only in my head. Like those Chaplin films that were lost for so long and they now say they've found, I don't know if you saw the news anywhere. Anyway, that's what I was, a reel, a spool, a roll, I don't know what you call it, a can of film that gets lost, and no one cares that it remains lost because no one intends to show it, and if someone did show it I swear no one would go to see it. What we did go to see was Of Human Bondage, which was showing then, before Christmas. I loved Paul Henreid; we were all a little annoyed with him because he'd taken Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca and hadn't left her to Rick, who was so charming. And we went to see it. Gabriel didn't like it. Of course, he'd read the novel. Who wrote the novel?"

"Somerset Maugham."

"Yes, that one. And he hadn't liked the novel either. Anyway, that was at the beginning of December. A week later, when I had managed to convince him to see it again, to see if he liked it this time, we received the news. Konrad Deresser had killed himself. Konrad, Enrique's father. I'm not even sure you know who I'm talking about."

"Enrique Deresser, yes. Dad's friend, no? I think he met him at your hotel. Yeah, he talked to me about Enrique Deresser a couple of times, especially when I was about twelve or thirteen, and one time he told me about the death of Konrad Deresser. But then he didn't anymore. He stopped mentioning the subject. Just like that, all of a sudden. As if Deresser was the Christ child or Santa Claus, you know? As if my father had said to me, Children talk about these things, but for an adult they are ridiculous characters. That happened with him."

"Tell me what you know."

"I know that Enrique's father went broke. I know he killed himself, took I don't know how many sleeping pills and washed them down with a cocktail of liquor and gunpowder. I also know that it all happened in a dive of a hotel, no, in a boardinghouse on Twelfth Street, on Twelfth around Fifth or Sixth, because one time we were walking past there and Dad told me. Look, this is where Deresser's father killed himself, he told me. I remember it very clearly, we were walking down Fifth Avenue toward Luis Angel Arango. We were going to look for a couple of books that he thought were absolutely crucial for my thesis. Longinus's On the Sublime, and The Art of Persuasion in Greece by Kennedy. He thought my thesis was for a different degree, I guess."

"That's incredible, you remember the titles? How can you? What an amazing memory."

"One always remember titles, Sara. When my mum died I was reading The Man with the Golden Gun by Ian Fleming. When I graduated I was reading Clandestine in Chile. Garcia Marquez. When they killed Lara Bonilla, I was reading Hiroshima. John Hersey. One always remembers, or at least that's how I am. Not you? Don't you remember what you were reading on important dates? Let's see, what were you reading when your husband died?"

"I don't know. I remember there was a bullfight on. It was Pepe Caceres. The bull caught him but he wasn't hurt. I saw it all from up here. And I don't even like bullfighting."

"But no books."

"No. I guess I'm not like that."

"Well, anyway, Longinus and Kennedy. Those were my authors when Dad told me about Konrad Deresser."

"I didn't know he'd told you. It's strange. Anyway, let me tell you the rest: Gabriel was in the hotel that weekend. I had kept on working in the hotel after the war, with more and more responsibilities, because suddenly the ability to speak Colombian Spanish had made me indispensable. What a word: indispensable. Your dad and I were twenty-two years old, and Enrique a little older, twenty-four or twenty-five, already grown up. Twenty-two, can you imagine? Who's indispensable at the age of twenty-two? My grandson's that age, or at least somewhere around there, and I see him and think: We were that age? Weren't we children? Of course, back then we were already people at twenty-two, we were adults, and these days a thirty-year-old is still a child. But it doesn't matter, we were young. How was it that the things that happened to us happened? Aren't there things that a person only does when they're older; is there not a minimum age for doing certain things, especially the ones that mark your life? I've spent so many years asking myself these questions that the answers now matter very little to me. Now what I want is for no one to answer them, because an unexpected or strange reply would make me revise my life. And there comes a time when we're no longer up for revisions. I'm no longer up for revisions. Gabriel tried to revise, for example, and I don't know what his girlfriend thought about that, but things aren't that simple. You can't start revising your life and rest easy. It's forbidden to revise and rest easy. That should be inscribed on our birth certificates, so we know what to expect, so we don't go through life doing silly things.

"Your father was at law school, but even so he managed to come out to Boyaca every weekend. When he couldn't catch a bus, I'd look through the reservations for someone we knew, and he would always get a lift, as if guests' cars were for hire. I'd just give him the phone number, and he'd take care of the rest: he'd call, put his case in his Don Juan voice, and the guests would end up offering him a place in their car. Gabriel had this ability: he managed to get people to do things for him. It wasn't just that he knew how to talk, no. People believed him, people trusted him. Even Papa would let him stay in the hotel without paying the full rate, which would have been out of Gabriel's reach, something he might've been able to afford three times a year. And so he'd arrive with his contracts and administrative procedural textbooks, and he'd study for a while, almost always in the mornings, and then we'd go out for a walk, when my work in the hotel allowed. This wasn't during the school term, and for the holidays Gabriel would normally get some job, driving trucks all over the country as if Colombia were the size of a ranch. Of course, they hired him because he had the stamina of an ox and he could sit behind a steering wheel for twenty straight hours without sleeping, hardly even stopping to eat. That year he drove fuel tankers during the transport workers' strike. . but you know about that, don't you?"

"Yes, he told me about that several times as well. 'On the Crown.' The trucks."

"Well, that Christmas there weren't any trucks to drive, there wasn't any work, because the strike was over. Gabriel couldn't bear staying at home. He never talked to you about that, I'm sure. He couldn't stand your grandmother. And I have to say I could see why. Dona Justina was already puritanical before they killed her husband, and from that moment on she went to unbearable extremes, especially for her only child. So it was the most normal thing in the world for Gabriel to ask me for asylum, I'm not exaggerating, that's the word he used, holiday asylum, because his mother, to celebrate Christmas, got together with three old maiden aunts, and for each novena they said the rosary with such fervor that after her death the doctors found one of her kneecaps was dislocated and said it was from her spending so much time kneeling during the second half of her life. Gabriel made fun of her in public. It was a little painful to watch."

"I never knew her."

"No, of course not. When she died you would have been two or three years old, and Gabriel never wanted to take you to her house for her to see you. The old lady sent everybody to tell him that she wanted to meet her grandson, that she didn't want to die without seeing her grandson, and Gabriel didn't react at all. With time I came to realize that he was throwing it back in her face. . it's just a saying, of course, because in that family they never faced up to things, they didn't talk about illness or misunderstandings or anything. Do you know what he reproached her for? — well, what I think he reproached her for behind her back-That she should have let herself die after the death of her husband. That she buried herself alive at the age of thirty-five-because I don't think she could have been any older when they killed your grandfather. Let's see, Gabriel was ten or twelve, probably twelve, so she was just barely into her thirties, yes, she was already dead and in mourning at that age, and Gabriel said that sometimes her mourning was for her own death. He talked to me about that several times. He'd come back from his Catholic school and come home to rooms darker than those of the priests, the furniture all covered with sheets so the upholstery wouldn't get worn, an enormous crucified Christ in every room, all identical, the ones with lots of blood and open eyes, you know? The ones that usually have crosses made of corrugated wood, if you can say it like that. Have you seen those?"

"I think so, I've seen them somewhere. The ones that aren't smooth. The sort of irregular ones, like chocolate braids."

"Before they killed your grandfather, Dona Justina taught Gabriel how to make the crosses, because at the house in Tunja the child had a lot of free time and there was more than enough wood. And afterward, for a time, she still forced him to go on making them. Making wooden crosses until he was twelve or thirteen. How he hated her for that. He remembered those crosses all his life. After that he hated all manual labor, I think partly because of that. Or did you ever see him painting the house, or trying to learn how to play an instrument, or fixing the plumbing or a cupboard door, or cooking?"

"But I always thought that was because of his hand."

"Ah, his hand."

"That had to affect his life, no? It dictated what he could and could not do, defined his interests. He didn't even write, Sara. And he was always telling me about his childhood complexes, about the effects of the deformity on a child-"

"No, wait. One thing at a time. There wasn't any effect, nothing like that."

"How so?"

"What happened to his hand was later. And it didn't happen the way you think it did. He grew up with both his hands intact. That Christmas, his hand still existed, and it existed for a few days more. Or rather, what happened was just a little after what I'm telling you about. But I don't understand, you told me you knew about the trucks. How was he going to drive one of those monstrosities with a mutilated hand? No, no, that day, when Gabriel came down to breakfast and found out that Konrad was dead, all his fingers were intact, he was an intact man. People were gathered around the radio, I remember, not because they'd just broadcast the news, but simply because we'd got used to the idea that that was the meeting place for certain things. How I wish I knew what ever happened to that radio. It was one of those Philips that looked like a doctor's bag, the most up-to-date model, with its little wicker screen and everything. Papa told me the news and asked me to tell Gabriel. He knew how close Gabriel and Enrique were, everyone knew. It was obvious that Gabriel would have wanted to be informed. In half an hour he'd had something to eat so as not to travel on an empty stomach, packed, put on his new shoes, a pair of moccasins with leather soles as smooth as baby's skin, and he was ready to ask the first person leaving for Bogota for a lift. 'But he's already been buried,' Papa told him. 'It was almost a week ago.' Gabriel didn't pay him any attention, but it was obvious he was hurt. His friend's father had died, and no one had told him, no one had invited him to pay his last respects. He asked me to come with him, of course, and he did it there, in front of Papa: that was a measure of the confidence he had, of the trust Gabriel inspired even when he was so young. I asked what we were going for, and he said, 'What else? To pay our last respects to Senor Konrad.' 'But they've already buried him, Gabriel,' Papa said again. And Gabriel, 'Well, it doesn't matter. We'll pay our respects in the cemetery.'

"But we didn't go to the cemetery. We got to Bogota that very afternoon, around four, caught the tram at Seventy-second, but when we got to Twenty-sixth Gabriel sat still in his seat, without making the slightest move. I asked him what was going on, weren't we going to the cemetery? 'Later,' he said. 'First I have to talk to someone.' And that was how I found out that Konrad Deresser had been living with a woman at the time of his death, but what was more shocking was that Gabriel knew and I didn't. Not that he knew her, but he knew of her existence. Her name was Josefina Santamaria and she was from Riohacha. And we showed up unannounced, we showed up to visit her in the boardinghouse at Eighth and Twelfth where Deresser had lived. Josefina was a black woman, taller than Gabriel. The only thing I knew about her life was that she'd arrived in Bogota six months previously and that she went to bed for good money with members of the Jockey Club. I didn't know anything more because that afternoon we didn't talk about her but about Deresser. She was the one who told us, second by second, how he'd killed himself. 'Of course I knew, love, how could I not know,' Josefina told us. 'You could see in his face that he was half dead.' 'And why didn't you do something?' asked Gabriel. 'And how do you know I didn't? When I saw him go out that morning, I went out after him and followed him. I followed him all morning, what more was I supposed to do? What happened was that he took me by surprise. He was a lively one, my little monkey.'

"That morning, like every morning back then, Deresser had left late, around ten, to have coffee and brandy for breakfast across the square from the Molino. 'He always sat there,' said Josefina, 'to watch the students' girlfriends, I think.' But Josefina wasn't jealous, just the opposite: when she saw him off in the mornings, she said give my regards to the girls, let's hope the wind picks up and lifts one or two of their skirts. That morning he stayed longer than ever, as if someone had stood him up and he didn't know what to do. He walked back and forth across the plaza, he walked toward the Espectador building and waited to see the news on the blackboard. 'Ever since they started bringing out that board, he'd stopped buying the newspaper,' Josefina said. They stopped doing that blackboard thing later, but for many it was the perfect solution while it lasted: a guy came out of the window at certain times with the most important news items written there, by hand, as they happened, it was great. Deresser didn't have any money to buy the newspaper, and had become a regular client of the news board. That morning the street in front of the newspaper office was full, but full of ladies, who wanted to know how and where they were going to pay tributes to the Archbishop, who was celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of his ordination. Deresser approached them, tried to speak to one or two, and was unwelcome, of course. No one wanted to be approached by a bearded man who looked like he hadn't slept and almost always smelled of sweat and sometimes of urine, even if he did carry a leather briefcase that looked like it had seen better days, even if he did still have those green eyes that had made him famous among the women who worked at the Nueva Europa. And Deresser repeated the routine, walking back to the Garces shop and returning to the front of the newspaper offices, not once, not twice, but several times.

"If he had arranged to meet someone there, that person didn't show up. If he was waiting for someone, that person didn't come. Deresser went into the Molino twice, walked through looking at the tables, and both times he stopped under Sancho Panza and from there looked around at all the tables again, but nothing. Nothing he wanted. So he kept walking, he crossed the plaza and went south on Sixth. 'He was walking right up against the wall,' said Josefina, 'as if the rest of the people were lepers, or he was.' Josefina saw him go into a pawnshop, the kind that used to be more common then than they are now, and come out again without his briefcase. At first she thought the obvious, that he'd just pawned that ugly briefcase for which he couldn't have got much, but later she found out that he'd also taken the last luxury he had left, and that was, in any case, a useless luxury: a record of classical music. It was useless because days before he'd pawned the turntable he used to listen to it. For Deresser that moment, the moment he pawned his last record, had to mean something terrible. People who are going to kill themselves cling to silly little things, construct symbols out of everyday items to mark a date. Pawning that record marked a date for Deresser, not just because with this gesture he marked the closure of his life, but also because it was probably that money he later used to buy the sleeping pills from the Granada Pharmacy.

"Deresser was a failed musician but one who had taken that failure well. He'd set up a glassworks to keep his family fed when he realized that in Colombia it was going to be impossible to make a living from teaching the piano. That was back in 1920, when he'd recently arrived in Bogota. But a few years later, after meeting people in the terrible process an immigrant goes through, he gradually got into the National Radio Service, and eventually worked there. He decided what they played and when, he told the presenters about Chalia- pine or Schoenberg, and they would repeat on air what he'd told them two hours earlier. For those who knew the Deressers, that was the family's best time, a few years when no one would have imagined a personal disgrace awaited them, a time that ended or began to end in forty-one, when Santos broke with the Axis. Among the first things they went after were the broadcasters. There could not be any German or Italian or Japanese people near the airwaves. And Deresser arrived one morning to find he didn't have a job and, furthermore, some people looked down on him. The family was left as it had been before: depending on the glass they sold. And they didn't do badly, the glass made good money, and besides, Deresser stayed in contact with the two programmers at the station who didn't reject him, and they saw each other once in a while and he made recommendations. But music, at least for Deresser, was no longer a source of work. After that, between forty-one and forty-six, Deresser listened to music, though less and less, and he finally accepted that things in his life weren't going to go as he had wanted them to, accepted that someone had taken his life out of his hands. In October he found out that the first Nazis were going to be hanged in Nuremberg in the middle of that month, and the first thing he did was to get a record by Wagner, whom he'd detested all his life, and call his friends at the station. They saw him at the boardinghouse, as far as Josefina recalled, his friends came without making any comment about the place or the company he was in, but you could see the sorrow on their faces. Deresser showed them the record and talked about it with such enthusiasm, or feigning enthusiasm with such talent, that his friends left the boardinghouse promising they'd play it one of these days, thanking him for introducing them to a little-known work by a rarely broadcast composer, asking him to keep in touch, to keep making suggestions, contributions. . Deresser asked them one more thing. He asked them as a special favor to please broadcast it on the fifteenth of October, and he said that day was Enrique's birthday and that the Wagner piece was one of his favorites and it would be a good birthday present, and they believed the whole lie, they left feeling moved and making new promises. They fulfilled them. They played the record on the 15th of October, the day of the hangings in Germany. The Wagner piece was called The Mastersingers of Nuremberg. Half the Germans in the city called up indignantly. The other half called up to ask who'd been responsible because they wanted to congratulate him. Josefina said it was the last time she saw Deresser more or less happy, although it was for mocking half the world without the other half knowing.

"After pawning The Mastersingers, Deresser must have known what he would spend the money on. He went down Seventh then headed north, walking slowly like a tourist. 'He stood for about half an hour in front of the Granada,' said Josefina. Not right in front of it on the same side of the street, but on the opposite sidewalk, as if he were about to shoot an elephant and was keeping an eye on it from a distance. But when he did go into the pharmacy, when he finally made up his mind, he went in and came out again in two seconds. 'I think it was when he came out that he noticed. I was really hidden. I was there in Parque Santander, behind a tree, don't know how my little monkey did it, but I think that's where he saw me.' And then again the same thing, but in reverse: again south on Seventh, passing in front of Gabriel's office, though no one can ever know if Deresser thought of Gaitan at that moment, even if purely through the power of suggestion. He kept going down to the Plaza de Bolivar, as if this time he did have an appointment. A few blocks before arriving, he could already hear the noise of the people gathered in the Plaza de Bolivar, even if those people weren't shouting or singing or protesting. The ladies were really quiet, very decent they were, all of them standing facing the cathedral and some already with rosaries in their hands, the older ones especially. For Josefina, these were strange spaces, strange and even hostile, and she didn't usually go anywhere near them. The last time she'd passed through this plaza, though it was only a few blocks from her house, she'd been like a zombie following the people who came to hear the Te Deum and to wave flags and shout things the day the war ended.

"It was a quarter past three in the afternoon. The homage to the Archbishop had started not long before, certainly, because when the ladies at the front began to move toward the Palacio, there were a few at the back who were still feeding the pigeons little bits of bread, crouched down, holding their parasols in one hand, stretching out the other gloved hand full of crumbs. Josefina looked at them, dying of envy, because she liked pigeons but was allergic to them. And for a second, a single second, she watched one of those ladies, one who was wearing a wide-brimmed black hat with pink flowers, and who wasn't giving the pigeons bread crumbs but grains of hard yellow corn, and she stood watching the corn that bounced around, when a fat, reddish pigeon pecked at it on the ground. She was jealous of the lady with the black sun hat for the ease with which she could approach the pigeons. When Josefina, recently arrived in Bogota, had tried to do the same, her eyes had begun to water and her nose to itch so badly that she'd had to sit on the steps of the Capitolio because she couldn't see where she was going for the tears. Later, in the afternoon, she'd broken out in a terrible rash on her neck, and she didn't know and no one wanted to tell her where she could buy calamine lotion to put on to stop her scratching so much. Three days. Three days it took her to discover the Granada, which was so close to her boardinghouse. There she could get calamine when she no longer needed it, when she wasn't itchy anymore and already knew that she could never go near another pigeon in her life. And thinking about this, about the lotion and the Granada Pharmacy, she looked up again, after this briefest of seconds, and noticed that Deresser wasn't there anymore.

"She looked all around, swept the plaza with her gaze. She circled round the little group of women who were now moving. She went among them and endured their insults. They called her everything, insulted her the way those on the inside usually insult someone on the outside. But she didn't see him, she couldn't find him, she'd lost him. All she could see were black hats and dresses as if she were suddenly in the middle of a funeral, everyone wearing gloves, as if touching each other disgusted them, but among these easily disgusted people she didn't manage to find Deresser, only two or three faces that looked at her in horror, two or three mouths that said, A negress, a negress. She went all around the square, twice passed the window out of which Bolivar had leaped to keep from being cut to pieces in his own bed, but she didn't think of Bolivar or of anyone other than Konrad Deresser, a man who was fleeing from her, who was hiding from her, but at no point did it occur to her to recover her dignity, be guided by pride and stop looking for someone who at that moment did not want to be with her. It didn't occur to her that Deresser might have gone off with another woman, because that had never mattered to them, so he had no reason to hide such a thing from her. It didn't occur to her that Deresser might be mixed up in some shady business, because, in spite of having reasons to go mad with fury against this crazy country, which had broken his life and his family into pieces, in spite of all that, Deresser had never been one of those who take matters into their own hands. Quite the contrary, he was gentle, gentle as a lamb, too gentle for the world he got stuck with after forty-one. No, none of that occurred to her. Looking for him through La Candelaria and then down Seventh, Josefina was thinking about him the way you think about a lost child: more worried about him than about herself, less worried about losing him than about the fright the child will get when he realizes he's lost.

"She arrived back at the boardinghouse just after five in the afternoon. On her way she'd passed a group of men going to pay homage to the Archbishop just as their wives had done a couple of hours earlier, and she thought how odd the people of Bogota were, that they did everything like that, the men on one side, the women on the other, it was a miracle they hadn't gone extinct. Among the men she'd seen Don Federico Alzate, with whom she had an appointment later, and she acted as she always did when she ran into one of her clients in the street, looking down at her sandals and her white toenails, counting her toes, because she thought that this way, thinking about something else and not about pretending, the other's shame and her own pretense would no longer be visible in her face. And now in her room she lay down to wait. She couldn't wait by the window, because her room didn't have any windows. 'I realized that people without windows wait differently,' she told us later. At ten to seven, when Federico Alzate arrived, she was still waiting. Josefina normally insisted her clients take her somewhere else, out of a tacit agreement with Deresser and because it also seemed wrong to her to sleep in the same bed she used to earn the money to pay for it. But this time she chose to stay. She had time to get the job done. It was hours later, when her client had left and Josefina was washing, that she heard shouts on the stairs. It was the owner of the hardware store on the ground floor. He came repeating like a parrot what he'd just been told: Deresser had been seen laid out on Jimenez Avenue, three blocks from there, swimming in his own vomit.

"He wasn't dead, but when Josefina found him there was nothing to be done. The smell was that of a dead man, in any case, or at least that's the memory she was left with. Josefina discovered then that she'd grabbed the money she'd just earned on her way out the door, and she wanted to give the ironmonger a peso to help her get Deresser to a hospital, but the ironmonger was already walking away and pretending not to hear. Josefina stopped two taxis, and neither of them wanted to take her even though she offered them the whole three pesos she had in her hand. Then she felt something on her leg and, lifting up her skirt, discovered she hadn't put on any underwear, and a mixture of water and semen was running down her thigh, making her kneel down and retch, and at the same time, as if the world had come to an agreement, a fellow with an open umbrella though it wasn't raining came over and said to her, 'Don't trouble yourself, baby. You can see from here he's already on the other side.' Later, when it was dark, when first the police had come and then the detectives to take the body away, a journalist was listening to the statements of a witness. 'I saw him running over there,' he said and pointed toward Third, 'as if he was drunk, and covered in sick, and shouting, he was shouting that his stomach hurt.' It seems, as was later discovered, that Deresser had gone to sit in the Chorro de Quevedo, presumably after giving Josefina the slip, and in all likelihood it was there that he took the pills, although no one knows or ever will who got the gunpowder-laced alcohol for him. It's incredible that he actually managed to walk from the Chorro to the place where they found him, near the Parque de los Periodistas. That's what had the most effect on Gabriel, the image of Konrad Deresser running half asleep and feeling the mixture burning his guts instead of anesthe tizing him and killing him silently as he'd expected. 'He must have been very frightened, and sleeping pills take longer to work in a frightened person,' years later a doctor told Gabriel, after he'd explained the case, without naming any names, as a hypothetical case, just out of interest. 'And would it be very painful?' asked Gabriel. 'Oh, yes,' replied the doctor. 'It would hurt worse than death.'

"That day we ended up leaving the boardinghouse very late. We realized we hadn't eaten anything since breakfast, and of course Josefina had nothing to offer us. Although it was obvious, I said to Gabriel that it was too late to go to the cemetery, and asked him if he wanted to go the next day. But his mind was elsewhere. He didn't look at me, didn't hear me, and he was walking three steps ahead of me as if I were his body-guard. I thought he was going to suggest we go to the Parque de los Periodistas, or to look for the physical space where Deresser had died, but he didn't. And then I began to think what I later managed to put into words: Gabriel hadn't taken me to see Josefina to find out what she knew, or at least that wasn't his only reason. We'd gone to see her, and had listened to her talk and talk and talk for a whole afternoon, to confirm what she didn't know. Because it was perfectly obvious that this woman had lived all those months with Konrad Deresser without it mattering a damn to her where he came from or where he was going or why he was in the mess he was in or how he thought he'd get out of it. If she hadn't asked, we were both thinking, why was he going to explain. 'If he didn't explain it to her,' Gabriel said to me then, 'that means he hadn't explained it to anyone.' That's what he said. And I agreed, of course. It was the most logical explanation. And in spite of being so logical, and in spite of my agreeing, I didn't ask Gabriel why all that seemed so important to him. Most of all, why confirming that had seemed more urgent than going straight out to find his friend. Although the following day he did. He went to look for Enrique and didn't find him, he didn't find anybody. Much later we found out that Enrique had left home. Later, that he'd left Colombia. That was what your dad found out. But he didn't find out where he'd gone.

"I didn't want to go with him that time. I was too overwhelmed by all that had happened. I'd seen more than one case like that, of course. I'd seen my fair share of failures, of people who'd gone under, but this was different. I'd never seen anything like that up close and never anyone who'd killed himself. Yes, I'd heard of people who'd killed themselves; in those years it wasn't such an exotic thing. News from Germany, but also from immigrants. But what do you want me to say? When something like that happens to someone you know, who you've spoken to and seen and touched, it's like finding out for the first time. As if up to that moment you didn't know that was possible, to kill yourself because of problems. Konrad's case stood out, not because it was odd, but because it was close. Thousands of Germans went through the same thing with the blacklists, then their assets were frozen and put into trusts. Thousands were left absolutely ruined, watched for five years as their money went up in a puff of smoke. Thousands. After the blacklists, getting sent to the Fusagasuga internment camp was child's play; for old Konrad it was almost a rest, because by the time they sent him there his inclusion on the blacklist had left him almost bankrupt. Those interned in the camps were fed, and they didn't have to worry about utility bills and all those things. In theory, the government took their expenses out of their accounts, but if the internee had no money, what were they going to do, starve him to death? No, they went on giving him what they gave the others, and that's what must've happened with the old man. In any case, these ones were almost lucky; that's what you can see over time. One hundred and fifty, two hundred Germans, almost all upper class, were guests of the state under the pretext of having links with the Nazis or spreading propaganda or whatever, and of course, sometimes it was true. In that place there were people of the worst sort just as there were harmless little men who wouldn't hurt a fly. Some had already been on the lists, but not always. The old man had, and that's what matters. The punishment of the lists was suffered by thousands, like I said, but we only saw one fall from start to finish like that, like a plane, like a duck that had been shot, and that was Enrique's dad. Old Konrad, who wasn't old. We called him that because his hair was gray, but he was only about fifty-five when he killed himself. I've known people just starting out at that age.

"I remember the piece of paper, as if I had it right here; worse, it's strange that I don't have it. I suppose I got the collecting bug later, no? No one grasps the importance of what's happening when it's actually happening. If a genie appeared and offered me three wishes, that's what I'd ask for, to know how to recognize things that are going to be important later. I don't mean for other people, that's always easy to tell. For instance, we all knew that with Gaitan that was it. When they killed him, we all knew this country would never recover. No, with public things it's different; I'd like to recognize them when they happen to me, that phrase your best friend says, that thing you see by accident-one doesn't know that it's important. I'd like to know it. Well, later the lists appeared in books, facsimiles, as they called them, and we could see them, the ones who wanted to could see what those little pieces of paper that buggered us up so much, pardon my French, looked like. The circulars the gringos sent, and all, you know? The heading, the name of the country between two lines, the month in English and the translation. The thirty or forty pages of names. The names, Gabriel, the thousands and thousands of names all over Latin America. Hundreds of names in Colombia. That was the important part.

"Nice and organized, in alphabetical order, not in order of warrant or degree of danger. The owner of a bookshop in Barranquilla where Nazis held meetings and where they gave away free copies of Mein Kampf to everyone who came in-that man's name would be alongside a poor Japanese greengrocer who'd sold a few potatoes and carrots to the Spanish Embassy, and for that alone, just for exchanging a few of his vegetables for a bit of cash from the Franco regime, they put him on the blacklist. What power a list can have, no? That column down the left with all the letters exactly the same, all capitals, one after another, it's always fascinated me. I've always found lists enthralling, why should I deny it? There's nothing wrong in that either, I suppose, nothing reproachable. A telephone directory was the best thing I could have when I was little; I'd put my finger at the top and slide it down a page where they were all L's or M's, where they were all W's. The feeling of tranquillity that gives you. The feeling that there is an order to the world. Or at least that it can be put into order. Take the chaos of a hotel, for example, and you put it down on a list. I don't care if it's a list of things to do, of guests, the payroll. Everything that needs to be is there and what's not there isn't because it shouldn't be there. And you breathe easy, sure of having done things as they need to be done. Control. That's what you have when you make a list: absolute control. The list is in charge. A list is a universe. What isn't in a list doesn't exist for anyone. A list is proof of the nonexistence of God. I said that to Papa once and he slapped me across the face. I said it to sound interesting, a bit to see what would happen, and that's what happened, a slap. But deep down it's true. Well, anyway, in December 1943, on page 6, Enrique's father's name appeared on the list. Above him was 'DeLaura, Luciano, PO Box 199, Cali.' Below him was 'Droguerias Munich, Tenth Avenue no. 19–22, Bogota.' And in between those two, in that space so neat and orderly, was Enrique's father. 'Deresser, Konrad. Cristales Deresser, Thirteenth Street no. 7-17, Bogota.' That simple, all on one line, name, business, and address, and they didn't even have to use two lines, didn't even have to break into the margin the way they do when a single item occupies two lines in a list. That always bothers me, taking up two lines when one is sufficient, because it looks ugly. Old Konrad would have agreed with me. Old Konrad was always very orderly.

"A few days later, even before I knew about the matter, Margarita Deresser phoned the hotel. That was Enrique's mother's name. She was from Cali, with very pale skin and very long surnames, you know what I mean. I answered. She wanted to talk to my father, she explained to me. They needed witnesses. Deresser had requested an appointment with the Consultation Committee and they'd just got back from the interview; it had been at the United States Embassy. That was a new thing. Before it was only the embassy that could decide if a person should be included on the list or not. Now there was a committee. 'It didn't do any good,' Margarita said. 'It won't do any good, you'll see. What they want is our money, Sarita. And they'll take it with or without a committee, with Doctor Santos or with Lopez or whomever. This very thing has happened a thousand times already. Not to people we know, but you hear about these things.' They'd been offered tinticos and tecitos, a little coffee, a little tea, those diminutives people in Bogota like to use to seem friendly, and they'd been asked why the gentleman thought his name should be removed from the list of nationals with their assets frozen. They'd been listened to for fifteen minutes while they tried to explain that it was all a misunderstanding, that Senor Deresser didn't have any kind of economic or personal relations that could possibly go against the interests of Colombia or the United States, that he was no supporter of the Fuhrer, far from it, he felt loyal to President Roosevelt, and all so that finally an assistant or ambassadorial secretary could tell them that Senor Deresser's relations with enemy elements were more than proven, as was his sympathy for propaganda activities. That's how it was, they were very sorry, they weren't going to be able to reconsider the matter, it wasn't up to them, but to the State Department. 'I don't know what we're going to do,' said Margarita. 'Konrad of all people, that's what bothers me. If this happened to your father I know he'd work it out. But Konrad is weak, he lets life get him down. Someone has to explain it to them, Sarita. Tell them he hasn't got anything to do with the Axis or anyone, that he doesn't know anything about politics, he's only interested in music and being able to make his panes of glass in peace. Your father has to write to them. He has to tell them what Konrad's like, what we're all like. Important people have stayed in the hotel: You're not going to tell me they can't pull some strings, are you? We have to get him off that list, Sarita. We'll do whatever it takes, but we have to get him off that list. If not, this family's going to the devil.' I asked, 'And what does Enrique say?' And she told me, 'Enrique doesn't want anything to do with it. He says that's what we get for mixing with Nazis.' "

Of course (said Sara Guterman), then I knew where it all came from. Actually, the fact that Enrique had turned his back on Konrad seemed normal to me, because they'd never got along very well. But for him to wash his hands of something so serious was not so normal, because being on the list was going to affect him as well, no doubt about it. The truth is, I couldn't understand it. "Nobody knows Enrique," your dad said to me around that time. "Not you, not me, not his mother. Nobody has any reason to expect anything from him. You find that surprising? Well, you'll just have to swallow it and learn not to expect things from people. Nobody's what they seem to be. Nobody is ever what they seem to be. Even the simplest person has another face." Yes, as a philosophy that's fine, but there was nothing in the way Enrique was, nothing in his persona or his talk that could lead anyone to expect this. For me it was a betrayal, to put it frankly. The word is very strong. Betraying your father is something that happens only in the Bible, and that's how I saw it. But suddenly what your dad said was true, and we simply hadn't looked as closely at Enrique as we should have. And we'd known him for quite a while. He'd spent Holy Week in the hotel every year since 1940, more or less, maybe earlier. Old Konrad had been granted a sort of private tender, which was how my father did things in the hotel. Out of nationalistic preferences, or immigrant solidarity, or whatever you want to call it, the fact was that from the very beginning, it was Konrad who took charge of the four hundred and fifty-nine panes of glass for the renovation of the Nueva Europa. Imagine. Every mirror and every window, every rectangle of every glass door, beveled or otherwise, smoked for the boudoirs, frosted for the bathrooms, and silvered glass for the chandelier in the dining room. In reality, Enrique didn't care a fig for the hotel and his father's glass. Other things mattered to him. For example, the hotel was full of women, and Enrique was convinced that women existed on the face of the earth only so he could pick and choose between them as if they were avocados. Of course, sometimes it seemed he wasn't wrong. He'd arrive at the hotel in his elegant Everfit suits, with his Parker 51s, carrying flowers and moving with the self-confidence of a bolero singer and looking like an archduke, and the women would melt, it was embarrassing. But he was a fascinating guy-even I could never deny that. And not only because he had foreign airs, something which has always gone down well here, or because he moved as though he'd been offered the world and declined it out of modesty, or because he was able, simply by walking into the dining room with his hair slicked back and the manners of a nobleman's son, to evoke obscene comments from the female employees and secret favors from the guests' wives, but also because his voice seemed lie-proof. Enrique's words didn't matter-his authority mattered. I swear, Enrique made his interlocutors feel they were outside their lives for an instant, as if he'd rescued them and put them on an operatic stage. (But no, Enrique didn't like opera. Just the opposite, he looked down on it, he looked down on that music to which his father devoted his free time and some of his work time, too.) And when you talked to him, he looked in your eyes and at your mouth, your eyes and mouth, with such intensity that at first people wiped their mustaches, thinking they had crumbs there, or took off their spectacles to see whether there was something on the frames. Then you'd figure out that no, it was just the attention he gave. That was what it was like to talk to him. A war could break out in the garden, and he wouldn't take his eyes off you.

Enrique never spoke German in public. He'd learned it at home, it was the language he spoke with his father, but outside, working in the glassworks or when he was at the hotel, he would answer in Bogota Spanish even though old Konrad had asked in Swabian German. For your dad all this was a sacred mystery. The first time he went to the Deressers' house for dinner, that big, comfortable house in the neighborhood of La Soledad, he thought it was so strange. When he arrived it was like his friend, when he changed languages, was no longer the same person. Enrique was talking and he didn't understand. He was talking in his presence and he had no way of knowing what he was saying. At first he was taken aback, and then he became suspicious. But later Gabriel went off thinking it was the most fascinating spectacle he'd ever seen, and the next time he asked me to go with him. As a sort of guide to German customs, or occasional interpreter. Now I think he wanted witnesses. After dinner, Enrique asked old Konrad, "Would you go back for good?" He answered evasively and immediately started to speak about the language he'd been born into and then about Spanish, which seemed so difficult to him. He'd read some poet saying that slang was like a wart on the common language. That's what stayed with me, a wart. "No matter how hard we try," he said, "that's what we immigrants are, producers of warts." Then he closed the conversation, and it was almost better that way, because Enrique was apt to say very harsh things that he'd never allow himself to say about other things, about romantic composers or Bohemian glass. Enrique said he was never going to teach his children German, and he repeated it to your dad and to me on several occasions. I understood him, of course, because my father received letters from acquaintances or colleagues or distant relatives. In them people explained to us how terrible it was talking familiarly, using the language affectionately or to say pretty things, when for all practical purposes it was the language of National Socialism.

Of course, Enrique began to realize that his father's language was dying in his head, not only because he didn't use it outside the home, but because he didn't speak it with people his own age, and his idioms, sayings, and set phrases were all thirty years out of date. That's how he saw the contradictory and even unbearable situation of being enclosed in a language that didn't think like he did but like his father: that's where those desires to rebel against his own home came from. It was very strange. It was like a will to be a character without a landscape, you know? Someone with no relation whatsoever between his body and the carpet, between his body and the dining room walls. In the house there was a piano rented by the day and a portrait of a Prussian military officer, some illustrious ancestor, I think. Enrique didn't want to have anything to do with that. He wanted to be a character with no backdrop. A flat, two-dimensional creature with no past. And when he went out, it was like he wanted to be new. Language was just one of the things that allowed it. With his looks, speaking Colombian Spanish was like putting on a wet suit and diving into the water, that feeling of comfort, of being in a strange medium but one in which you could move more easily than in your own. He was always going to make the most of it, no? Even if he was a fool. Enrique, for the first time, found out what your dad always knew: you are what you say, you are how you say it. For old Konrad things were exactly the opposite.

Margarita would sit me down in one of the velvet armchairs in the living room and offer me tea and biscuits or one of the cakes from Frau Gallenmuller's shop, the one at Nineteenth and Third, and talk to me about that; she'd start getting nostalgic right there, talking about her husband, and always end up telling me how different he was when he first arrived in Colombia, how he'd changed since then. She said time had betrayed him. It had betrayed both of them, everyone. Instead of returning to her husband the security that everyone feels in their own land, and that an exile gradually gains little by little, time had taken it away from Konrad. He had been forbidden spontaneity, Margarita said, the capacity to react unthinkingly, to make a joke or ironic remark, all the things that people who live in their own language can do. Partly because of this, old Konrad never had a normal relationship with a Colombian. What he said was too meditated or stilted to forge a friendship with anybody. Or complicity, at least. Complicity is very gratifying, but it's impossible if you don't speak properly. Enrique was lucky enough to figure that out and understand it, in spite of being very young. Konrad Deresser was always a very insecure person, and Enrique, from a very early age, became obsessed with creating the opposite sort of mask, inventing himself as someone able to trust in himself, develop the security that would allow him to talk to others as he did later talk to them. Without blinking. Without stuttering. Without thinking twice about a word. I've never known who learned it from whom, whether he learned it from your dad or your dad from him. At the beginning of 1942, a family of Germans came to live in Bogota from Barranquilla. You have to imagine what it meant to someone like the old man to talk to people from his country. I know, I can imagine, because my father felt the same way for a long time. Exactly the same. He'd run into a German and be in heaven. It was the best thing that could happen to him. Speaking continuously, fluently, without noticing his own grammatical mistakes on the other person's face, his clumsy conjugations, without thinking his pronunciation was going to make his neighbor burst out laughing from one moment to the next, without fearing rs and js more than thieves, without that feeling of vertigo every time he put the stress on the wrong syllable.

The family that arrived was called Bethke, husband and very young wife. He was about thirty, maybe a bit older, about the age you are now, and she would have been twenty, like us. Hans and Julia Bethke. It was at the time of the first restrictions. Citizens of the Axis nations out of the radio stations. Axis citizens off the newspapers. Axis citizens away from the coasts. Yes, that's how it was. All the Germans who lived in Buenaventura or Barranquilla or Cartagena had to go and live in the interior. Some went to Cali, others to Medellin, others came to Bogota. Bogota filled up with new Germans at that time. It was wonderful for the hotel; Papa was happy. Well anyway, the Bethkes were among these, from Barranquilla. For Buss und Bettag in 1943, the Deressers organized a small dinner, very low-key. Your dad was very surprised that they invited us. We were both about to turn twenty, but we were still babes, that's obvious; at that age one feels like the savior of the world, and it's a miracle we survive our own mistakes. There are those who don't survive, of course, there are those who at sixteen or seventeen or eighteen commit the only mistake they'll ever make and they're wound up for the rest of their lives. At that age you realize that everything they've told you up to then is pure rubbish, that the world is another entirely different thing. But does anyone give you up-to-date instructions, or at least a guarantee? Not at all. Figure it out as best you can. That's the cruelty of the world. It's not being born that's cruel-that's psychoanalysis for beginners. Nor losing your family in an accident. Accidents don't mean anything. What's cruel is that they let you reach the conclusion that you know how things work. Because that's the age of majority. A woman gets her period, and four or five years later feels sure there'll be no more surprises. And that's when the world arrives and tells you, None of that, Miss, you don't know a thing.

When they invited us, I explained the obvious to Gabriel: that Konrad Deresser owed heaven and earth to my family. If it hadn't been for my father, who gave him the contract for all the glass in the hotel, old man Deresser wouldn't even have enough money to eat, let alone to invite people to dinner. When they dismissed him from the radio station, my father paid the cook's son to find the twenty or thirty smallest windows in the hotel and break them without being seen. And then he ordered new ones from Deresser and paid the full price for them, and he also had to pay for two stitches to the boy's thumb, which he cut while trying to break a window in a bathroom on the second floor. So of course I was invited, since I was the daughter of Herr Guterman. Herr Guterman, by the way, was also invited. How could he not be. But he said no, no thank you. He sent me to be polite, and Gabriel came with me, but Papa made excuses because he was perfectly aware the Bethkes were Nazis. There are photos of meetings in Barranquilla, a swastika the size of a cinema screen and these people on their white-painted wooden chairs, all with their hair very neat. And on the platform or stage, whatever you call it, people in their well-pressed brown shirts, hands behind their backs, standing to attention. Or in meetings, all sitting round a table with its embroidered tablecloth, drinking beer. The Bethkes right there, he in white suit and tie, with his armband, and she with a brooch on her chest. In the photo you can barely see it but I remember perfectly: the eagle was gold and the swastika was onyx, a very well-made piece of jewelry. And I went to dine with these people one evening. It wasn't such an odd thing, believe it or not. I dined with swastika brooches, with armbands on several occasions. It wasn't exactly a regular occurrence at the hotel, of course, but before 1941 no one hid, none of them concealed anything, so it wasn't the most unusual thing in the world either.

So, why did he send me? If Papa preferred not to go himself, for the very understandable reason of disagreeable company, why didn't he mind my going? I wondered at the time, and later the answer was obvious. My father was an idealist. Only an idealist goes so confidently to a country like Colombia. People say the idealists are all dead, because they were the ones who stayed, hoping things would sort themselves out. I've never agreed. Those were the unfortunate ones, that's all. Or the ones who didn't have money. Or the ones who didn't get the papers to enable them to leave Germany or visas for the United States or wherever. On the other hand, the idealists packed their bags one night and said life's better somewhere we've never been. My father was a rich man in Germany. And one night he said, I'm sure we'll be better off selling cheese in the jungle. Because that's what Colombia was to a fellow like Papa, the jungle. Some of my school friends wrote me letters asking if there were lifts to take us up to the treetops, I swear. That is idealism, and that's why it seemed necessary to him that I represent the family and sit beside a fellow they said had a portrait of Hitler hanging in his living room. Here in Colombia it's another life, here we're all Germans, he'd say, here there are no Jews or Aryans, he'd say in the hotel, and in the hotel it worked for him. Yes, you'd have to be very naive, very shortsighted, I know. What about his friends hanged in the public squares in Germany? And those who'd spent years by then with a yellow star sewn on their clothes? Oh, yes, my father wasn't often wrong, but he was wrong about that. He believed, like so many other Jews, that Nazism abroad was a game, that exiles couldn't seriously be Nazis, no matter how many meetings they held, how much propaganda they spouted, how much evidence there was. We helped to build this country, didn't we? People were fond of us, no? Spirits were tempered here, people became more civilized and rational. Who could prove to him that the opposite was the case? Anyway, he wasn't the only one. The Jewish community was expert in denying the hatred of others, or whatever you want to call it. Of course, there would always be some guest to confirm those stupid ideas, because hotel guests aren't going to tell the owner what they think of his nose, are they? Guests aren't going to paint a swastika on the walls of their room, are they? No, at that time my father was a lamb. Old man Seeler, a horrible fellow, one of the patriarchs of anti-Semitism in Bogota, stayed in the hotel one time, and my father accommodated him with the excuse that he saw him arrive with Isaac's novel Maria in his hand. And I could give you thousands of examples like that. What can I say? From the beginning he thought he couldn't raise me to be resentful, he told me that often, that with me they'd have to cut their losses and start afresh, and besides (he didn't tell me this, but I can well imagine), he couldn't send out the idea that there were people with whom you do not sit, much less Germans like us. Like us, you see. In Colombia the enemy was less of an enemy. That's what the lamb my father sometimes was would have thought. Besides, remember in Colombia nothing was ever said about the camps in Europe, about the trains or the ovens. All that just was not in the Colombian press. We found out about it later, and those who knew about it while it was happening were on their own; the newspapers paid no attention to them. The fact is I served as ambassador for Herr Guterman the idealist, and that's how I ended up sitting between your dad and Herr Bethke, and facing Enrique Deresser, who was seated between the two women, Julia Bethke and Dona Margarita. At the head of the table, presiding but without any authority, was old Konrad, who looked smaller than he was when he was sitting down, but maybe it was the company that made him shrink.

Hans Bethke's perfectly shaven face, his little spectacles, everything about him said: I'll smile at you, but turn round and I'll stab you in the back. He had curly, blond, slicked-down hair, and it formed little spirals at his temples. His whole head was a whirl, like sharing a table with one of van Gogh's trees. And the tree talked. It talked a mile a minute. He used the little he'd done in his life to put down anyone else. Before we'd finished our drinks in the living room, we already knew that Bethke had traveled to Germany when he was twenty, for a short stay, sent by his family to get to know the land of his ancestors, and he'd returned to Colombia more German than the Kaiser. You would have said he wore his passport on his sleeve if his passport wasn't still Colombian. He had very small hands, so small that the salad fork looked like the one for the main course when he held it. Small hands, I don't know why, always make me sort of suspicious. Not just me, your father feels the same way. It was as if they were made to slip into the pockets of the people sitting next to him. But he didn't slip them anywhere. Bethke handled his cutlery as if he were playing the harp. But when he spoke it was something else. Bethke had a column in La Nueva Colombia, although I only found that out later. And hearing him talk was like hearing that, a column in a Fascist newspaper. Yes, that's what the man on my right was, a talking newspaper. Don't tell me it's not the height of irony.

With the aperitif still in his hand, Bethke started to tell Konrad about the things he'd brought back from his trip. Records, books, even two charcoal drawings by names that meant nothing to me. I said I liked Chagall very much. Just to participate in the conversation, that's all. And Bethke looked at me as if it were time for my bottle. As if I should brush my teeth and go straight to bed. He said something about decadent art, something I didn't really catch, to tell the truth, and then he spoke to Konrad as prudently as he could, but if he was trying to hide his indignation, he did it very badly. He was either a bad actor or a very good one; I never figured it out. "I'll tell you something, Herr Deresser," he said. "I wouldn't be here, having a drink with you, if I knew that sort of decadence could take hold in Germany. But I'm not concerned, and I won't deny the reason. I'm calm because the Fuhrer is looking after us; he looks after you and he looks after me, he reminds us what we are. There's something in the air, Herr Deresser. It's there for whoever wants to notice it, and I want to be part of it, here in Colombia or wherever, it doesn't matter; a man takes his blood everywhere he goes. No, no one renounces his own blood. Why should a German have to forget himself when he arrives here? Have you forgotten who you are, have my parents forgotten? Quite the contrary. What happens to their children is another matter. Do you know what I think of all these Germans who don't speak German, with their Hispanic names and their reactionary customs, the ones who show up late because people here are always late, who do sloppy work because here they're slapdash, who lie and swindle because that's normal here? They are sick. They're sick and they don't realize. They're like lepers. They're falling apart. They wanted to assimilate and they've done so downward. The ironic thing about this business is that people like me had to come along, people who first stepped on German soil at the age of twenty, to explain all this, to correct the path."

I don't think Gabriel would have really understood what he was talking about. But I didn't have to explain it to him; first, because I didn't even understand it very well, I heard these things and it was like they were talking to me underwater, and second, because Gabriel, during the lecture, had been upstairs in Enrique's room, listening to the first few chapters of La Voragine. They were broadcasting a reading, or rather a performance, of the novel on the radio, with sound effects and everything. There was thunder and rain, Gabriel said, and people walking through grass and the sound of monkeys and of people working, it was fascinating. When they came down to the dining room, they were still talking about it, and Konrad had to suggest to Enrique the possibility that the rest of us hadn't heard the program, that continuing to talk about the program in front of us might not be very polite. Among other reasons, because talking about La voragine was interrupting Herr Bethke. And that was a no-no. It might be the end of the world, but Herr Bethke would take his message to the other side of the table. That's what old Konrad seemed to be saying. He seemed to be saying, We're not aware of how lucky we are. He seemed to be saying, This table doesn't know how lucky it is. And all for the fact that sitting there with us was a man who knew Emil Pruefert, the famous Emil Pruefert, leader of the Colombian Nazi Party. Pruefert had been one of the first Germans to leave the country. We didn't know if they were friends, but Bethke talked about Pruefert as if they'd shared the same wet nurse as babies, as if they'd drunk milk from the same breast. And old Konrad was pale, pale with admiration maybe, or maybe with respect, in spite of knowing that Pruefert had left before Colombia and Germany had broken off relations, and even long before, which some thought strange and others just cowardly.

We'd never seen him like that, neither Gabriel nor I, and the impression was very shocking. It was as if he'd been emptied of himself. He couldn't hold his head up, that had to be it, it couldn't be agreement. That wasn't politeness or diplomacy. It wasn't the good manners of a host toward his guest. And I don't know if Enrique was pretending, making out he'd never seen his dad as that spectacle of disgusting obsequiousness, but he also looked shocked. "This is German," Bethke was saying. "To be able to sit down to a meal and talk of our land without complexes. Why should this country forbid us to use our language? What's already happened is terrible, but for us to let it happen is unthinkable. Why should we allow it, Herr Deresser? The government is closing German schools wherever they are. The German Secondary School of Bogota? Closed. The Barranquilla Kindergarten? Closed. What, seven-year-old children are a threat to the empire of the United States? You'll have read the comments by Struve, the Communist priest. The honorable minister didn't close a school, but an institute of political propaganda. And then there are these cheap harangues. No more Nazi teachers. Declare Spanish the official language of instruction. Let's make a bonfire on the patio and burn all the Nazi propaganda. And what is this material? History textbooks. That's what Arciniegas the minister is looking for, that's what President Santos wants, to burn German history books, to persecute and extinguish the German language in this country. And what are the Germans doing about it? They're letting it happen, it seems clear to me." Margarita interrupted him, or tried to interrupt him, talking about some association that was doing good things. Bethke heard her but didn't look at her. "Katz, a mechanic," he said. "Priller, a baker. Is that the great society? Are those the 'Free Germans'? There is poison in the blood of these Germans, Herr Deresser. The source of that poison must be cauterized, it must be done in the name of our destiny, that's what I say." At that moment your dad leaned over to me and said very quietly, "Liar, he didn't say it. It's from a very famous speech. Everyone in Germany knows it." To tell you the truth, it didn't surprise me that he should know things like that. But I couldn't follow it up, or ask him any questions, whose speech it was, what else it said, because Bethke never stopped talking. "Only a few dare to raise their voices, to protest, and I am one of them. Are you not proud of your German blood, Herr Deresser? And that that blood flows through your son's veins?" And that was when Enrique spoke for the first time. "Don't bring me into it," he said. He didn't say anything more, and it didn't seem like he would say anything else, but those five words were enough to make Konrad sit up straighter: "Enrique, please. That's no way to talk to a-" But Bethke cut him off. "No, let him, Herr Deresser, let him speak, I want to know the opinions of our young people. Young people are the reason for our struggle." "Well, don't tire yourself on my account," said Enrique. "I can take care of myself." Old Konrad interrupted. He obviously knew too well how far his son could go. "Enrique is a romantic," he said. "It's his Latin blood, Herr Bethke. How can you expect. . of course, you understand, those born in Colombia-" "I was also born in Colombia," said Bethke, cutting him short, "but that was an accident, and in any case I don't forget where I come from and what my roots are. At this rate Germany is going to be finished, Germany is going to lose the war, not against the Americans, not against the Com munists, but against every Auslandsdeutscher. No, one cannot stand around with one's arms folded watching the extinction of one's people. Everyone knows how human beings work. The mother always takes charge of raising the children, to a large extent by custom, and it's the mother's language the child adopts most naturally. Your wife knows it. Your son is the living proof. They rob us of our own blood, sir, they steal our identity. Every German married to a Colombian woman is a line lost for the German people. Yes, sir. Lost to Germanness."

He said that last bit looking down at his own plate to scoop up a spoonful of broth. No, it wasn't broth, it was cream of tomato soup, as thick as custard, that Margarita had had served with a little spiral of cream adorning the surface. In the center of the spiral, where there was a sprig of parsley, landed a whole bread roll, one of those the size of a fist, with a hard crust, you know the ones? Enrique had thrown it hard, as if he'd wanted to kill a fly perched on the parsley. The bread stayed there, held up by the density of the tomato soup, and the tomato soup landed on Herr Bethke's shirt and tie and slicked-back hair. And I got splashed a little, too, of course, inevitably. I don't have to tell you I didn't mind in the slightest.

Old man Konrad stood up as if his chair had a spring, shouting things in German and waving his arms around like a swimmer. In extreme situations, he would call Enrique by his German name. And this situation was extreme. Old Konrad shouting in German at his son, Heinrich, and wiping off Herr Bethke's shoulders. "Don't bother, don't trouble yourself," Bethke said with his jaw clenched so tightly that it was a miracle we could make out the words. "We were just going in any case." And his wife, the invisible Julia, stood up then, and she did so as she'd done everything all evening: without making a single sound. Her cutlery didn't make any noise, her spoon never touched the bottom of the dish, her napkin never made a sound when Julia wiped her little lips. She stood up, went to her husband's side. Two seconds later we heard the door. We heard Konrad saying good-bye. "I'm so sorry, Herr Bethke. Something like this, a person like yourself will know how to forgive. ." But we didn't hear anything from the guests, as if they'd turned their backs on the apologizing old man. There was the sound of those little bells that shake when the door is opened, when it's shut. We did hear that. The jingling. And then we saw old man Konrad return to the dining room, red with rage but without letting a single growl, a single insult escape. He kissed Margarita on the forehead and began to climb the stairs without looking at Enrique and without looking at us; we had stopped existing or we existed as a disgrace, like a finger pointing at him. It seemed incredible to me that he wasn't going to say anything, and then he said four words, four little words, "That won't happen again," and he said them in the same tone someone else might have used to say, "Tomorrow's market day." "It will happen again," Enrique said, "every time you invite a son of a bitch into the house." Margarita was crying. I noticed your father had turned away from her, probably so as not to make her feel worse. I thought it nice that it had occurred to him. Meanwhile old Konrad stood still on the first step, as if he didn't really know how to get to his room, or as if he was waiting on purpose for Enrique to say what he said: "I wonder when you'll ever be able to stand up to anybody." "Enrique, love," said Margarita. "Or doesn't it matter to you?" said Enrique. "Doesn't it matter if someone insults your wife in front of you?" "No more," said Margarita. Old Konrad began to go upstairs. "You're a coward," Enrique shouted. "A coward and a toady."

Have you ever seen the staircases in those houses in La Soledad? They were very special, because some of them, the most modern ones, didn't have banisters. If you are on the first floor watching someone climb the stairs, the person's body gets cut off a bit with each step, I don't know if you've ever noticed. On the first step you see the whole body. By the fourth the head's no longer there because the ceiling cuts it off. Farther up the torso's gone, and farther still all you can see are two climbing legs, until the person climbing the stairs disappears. Well anyway, the stairs of that house were like that. I'm telling you all this because Enrique shouted what he shouted when old Konrad was nothing but a pair of legs. "A coward, a toady." The climbing legs stopped, I think with one knee up, or at least that's how I remember it. And then they began to come back. One step down. Then another. Then another. The body of old Konrad was reappearing to us. His torso, his head. Until he was back on the first step. No, he didn't come all the way down the stairs. It was as if he wanted to assure us that in spite of his having returned to say something, the dinner was over, the evening had been canceled. And there, standing on one of the first steps, in profile for those of us who were sitting in the dining room, he looked at his son, at the son who had called him a coward and a toady, and he just burst, the dam gave way. He spoke in Spanish, as if he wanted to say to Enrique, Now I'll play by your rules. I don't need advantages, I don't need condescension, what I want is for you to get it once and for all. And Enrique got it, of course. We all got it. "Yes, I am a coward," old Konrad said, "but that's because I'm not what I want to be. I am a coward for staying here, here I am, that's the cowardly thing. Every day Germany is humiliated, read El Diario Popular and you'll see. Look what Roosevelt's lackeys are saying every day. Do they think nobody notices? They call us fifth columnists, they stone our legation, break the windows of our shops, forbid our language, Enrique, they close the schools and deport the principals. Why is Arciniegas closing our schools? Is it for political or religious reasons? It's not because there are Nazis, it's because there are laymen, and the ones who aren't secularists are Protestant. We don't know who's closing the German schools, whether it's the government or the Holy See, and meanwhile Arendt and his traitors call themselves Free Germans, and I'm just supposed to rest easy. Bethke does what I am incapable of imagining; he is a true patriot and not ashamed to say so out loud, to speak aloud, the German language was made to be spoken aloud. Even if a person is mistaken. Yes, he is surely mistaken, but he is mistaken on behalf of Germany. I've been ashamed of being German, but that is not going to last forever; all cowardice has its limits, even mine. I tell you, I am not going to remain quiet and calm. Germany has friends everywhere. You don't love Germany, of course, you have no roots. Do you know what it means to be German, Fraulein Guterman, or are you a rootless one as well? Your language forbidden, literature stolen from the German schools and burned in public by the priest? But there are people working so that these things will stop happening. I don't care if a government of backward people considers them dangerous, I don't care, a patriot is never dangerous. In Colombia there are people who pray for Germany to win. I am not one of them, but that doesn't matter, because German destiny is greater than its leaders, yes indeed, German destiny is greater than the Germans. And that is why we are going to resist in spite of ourselves. Sometimes a person has to do unpleasant things, and who is going to judge you, that's all that matters, who is the judge of your life is the only important thing. Hitler will pass, like all tyrants, but Germany remains, and then what? We have to defend ourselves, don't we? And we will resist, I have no doubt about that. However and by whatever means necessary."

So later, when they put old Konrad on the blacklist, I had to remember that in order to understand why Enrique had vanished as if it had nothing to do with him. And it still shocked me, because such disdain is always shocking, no? At first I thought: When their business is left without customers is he not going to suffer the consequences, too? Does he think this is a game, that people will keep buying from them in secret, that they'll risk being blacklisted as well? When they were forbidden from buying even a lightbulb, when they were no longer able to pay the salaries of their two or three employees, what was Enrique going to do? That's what happened, of course, and it happened more efficiently than we had imagined. Fear works very well with things like this, nothing like fear to get things moving. In a week, an office-equipment shop in Tunja had already canceled their orders for five-meter-by-four display windows so special that they'd had to bring in new casts through Panama. And also the display windows the Klings had ordered for their jewelry shop, smaller but also thicker, remained in storage in the warehouse, and later the suppliers of carbonates and limestone stopped sending their products, but they didn't bother returning the money they'd already been paid. Margarita told me all this. It was as if she felt obliged to keep me up to date. As if I were a shareholder of Cristales Deresser, or something like that. "We have to have the kilns checked. I call the fellow who usually does it, and you know what he tells me? That he doesn't want to get into trouble. He asks me to please understand, not to hold a grudge, that when all this is over we'll most certainly do business again, of course. But it was just that an acquaintance of his was working for Bayer, got fired, and now he can't find work anywhere. What do I care about his acquaintances? Not that I'm insensitive to other people's problems, but we're in no position, you understand, Sarita. This fellow has a signed contract with us. The most terrified one is Konrad. He just can't believe it. The agreements, he says to me, they've given their word. Does this no longer matter to anyone?"

It was around then that Margarita wrote a letter to the senators. She was looking for help, and someone had suggested these names to her. And my father was useful for that, because Leonardo Lozano had stayed at the hotel several times. He wasn't what you'd call a regular client, but he knew my father and he liked to go and talk to him, blunder along in German and convince himself my father understood his blunderings. So, after the holidays, as soon as the official offices reopened, Papa delivered that letter in person. Although I didn't see that one in particular, I saw dozens of similar letters during those years, letters of pure controlled desperation, letters wearing straitjackets. It was always the same procedure, so I can tell you more or less with certainty. Margarita's letter, if it resembled the ones the rest of the people wrote, would have been addressed to one or more senators of the opposition. The most privileged wrote to ex-president Santos, but that didn't always work. Sometimes it was better to appeal to less high-ranking people, because the gringos were afraid of debates in the Congress. Fear of the hostility of an important politician. Fear of disrepute, because that led, I suppose, to loss of diplomatic power. There were senators famous for their opposition to the lists and for having got several Germans removed from them. Margarita must have written to one of these. The letter would have started off saying that she was a Colombian citizen, that her father was so-and-so and her father's profession was such-and-such, the more Colombian the better. Then she explained that her husband was German, but that he'd arrived in Colombia long before the war, his roots in the country were undeniable, they even had a Colombian son. And then, the proof: We go to Catholic mass every Sunday. Spanish is spoken in the home. Her husband had adapted to the customs of our country instead of imposing those of his own. And most of all: he had never, never ever had sympathies for the Reich, not for the Fuhrer, nor for his ideas. He is convinced that the war had to be won by the Allies, he admires and respects the efforts of President Roosevelt to protect world democracy. So the inclusion of her husband (or her son) on the list is completely unjust, an aberration as a result of his nationality and surname but not of his actions or his ideas, because furthermore neither her husband nor her son had ever participated in politics, those affairs had never mattered to him, and the only thing he wanted was for the war to be over so he could carry on living in peace in this country he loved as if it were his own, et cetera, et cetera, a long et cetera. The letter would have said all that, always the same; if someone had been quick enough they could have made a fortune selling printed prototypes. A plea of Colombianisms, or of Colombiaphilia, however you want to put it. It was pathetic to read these letters, doubly so if they hadn't been written by an intermediary but by the interested party himself. And at the same time, by pulling strings or by whatever means, there were propagandists of the Reich who managed to get off the list with public apologies and bouquets of flowers from the government.

A week later, Margarita received a stamped and franked reply on official stationery. Lozano's personal secretary regretted that the senators could not be of any help, something like that. It seemed they'd done several similar favors and now everyone was appealing to them, everyone looked to those who had opposed the lists in the Senate, and there came a time when Santos tired of sending messages, of giving references, of speaking well of Germans so they would be taken off the lists. Margarita's arrived when the strings that could be pulled had worn away. Because influence wears out, too, everyone knows that. The Deressers were out of luck. They simply got there too late, that's all. If all this had happened in 1941, when the lists were new and not so radical and people did things to revoke unfair inclusions, things would have been different. But it didn't happen in 1941. It happened in 1943. Two little years. And that made all the difference. Margarita sent a couple more letters but didn't even receive replies. Well, that's not quite true: the first didn't receive a reply, but the second did. The reply was that old Konrad was going to be confined to the Hotel Sabaneta, in Fusagasuga, in the department of Cundinamarca, until the end of the war, due to his links with propagandists affiliated with the government of the Third Reich, and given that reports led to the consideration that his civic and professional activities could be prejudicial to the security of the hemisphere. With all this pomp, with all this ceremoniousness, they informed him, and two days later a bus from the General Santander School came to pick him up.

"And Margarita? What happened to her?"

"Well, she made a choice. She had two options, to go or to stay, and she made a choice. I don't remember exactly when she left home, or when we found out, rather. For some reason, that fact has disappeared from my head, me, who never forgets anything. At the end of forty-four, or was it already the next year? How long had the old man been in the Hotel Sabaneta, six months or a year? Of course, what happened was that the failure of the company and of the family was kept secret, as was normal back then. Everyone saw the decline, everyone knew when they sold the machinery and the least necessary bits of furniture, but the details weren't visible from the outside. And then Margarita left home. The first weekend after she'd gone, Papa took us to Fusagasuga, to visit old Konrad. 'And if they put me on the list for this,' he said to me, 'let them. Having friends doesn't infringe on anybody's democratic security, as far as I know. If one is forbidden from having friends, it would be better to know it once and for all.' 'But they say he's got Nazi sympathies,' my mother said. And he said, 'We don't know that. It's not been proven. If it's shown to be true, Konrad will not hear from us again. But it has still not been proven, we can still go and visit him and keep him company. His wife has left him, that's no small thing. We're not going to look the other way.' I thought he was right, of course. Also, there was a pro-Nazi demonstration during those days in Fusagasuga, a large number of students went to shout slogans against the imprisonment of the Germans, and no one did anything. There weren't even any arrests.

"Enrique didn't go, of course, even though we offered him a lift. No, he stayed home, and we didn't even try to insist. By then he'd distanced himself from everyone. He wasn't speaking to his father, didn't go to visit him even when someone offered to take him to Fusagasuga. He'd even distanced himself from us. He didn't return messages, didn't call, didn't accept any invitations. When Margarita went away, he lost the only bond he had left. 'The saddest thing,' my father said, 'is that all this will be over one day. Things are going to go back to normal again. This has to end sooner or later. And who will fix this family? Who will tell Margarita to come back, that everything will be fine from now on?' And it was true. But I don't blame her, Gabriel. I didn't blame her then, but now I blame her less. I've passed the age that she was then. Now I'm older, much older than Margarita was when she left her husband and son, and I confess that I'd have done exactly the same. I'm sure of it. One doesn't have to wait until things work themselves out, because that could take a year, but it could also take twenty. My father asked, 'Who will tell Margarita to come back?' And I thought, without saying so: If she comes back, and if she stays with them and waits, and if it turns out that the internment camps are still there fifteen years hence, and the Germans are still stuck in the Hotel Sabaneta, who's going to pay her back those lost years? Who's going to give her body back the years that it lost waiting for abstract things, a new law, the end of a war?

"That day at the Hotel Sabaneta was one of the strangest experiences of my life. It was a luxurious place. In normal times it must have been more expensive than ours, and that was saying something. Well, I don't know, I can't be sure, but it was a first-class place. Of course, it's hot over there, and that changes everything. Where we had a fireplace and heavy ponchos for the guests, they had enormous gardens with people sunning themselves in bathing suits. There was a huge swimming pool, something I'd hardly ever seen, and even fewer times had I seen so many blond heads atop seminaked bodies; it was a holiday resort like the French Riviera. Since the men spent most of their time alone, they saw no reason not to lie in the sun almost completely naked, and on visiting days the wives would find themselves with these people red as beets, some of them almost had sunstroke. That day the place was full. Imagine, a hundred and fifty families in a hotel where there was normally room for no more than fifty. It was like being in a bazaar, Gabriel. No one would have called those fellows prisoners of war. But that's what they were, no? Prisoners of war taking the sun. Prisoners of war sitting on a blanket eating roast chicken, an enviable picnic. Prisoners of war strolling with their daughters and wives along the most picturesque little gravel paths. Prisoners of war doing calisthenics in the gymnasium. Among them were some older men who walked around all day long properly dressed in white suits and ties, felt hats. Old Konrad was one of those, wearing a collar and tie in spite of the heat. The only ones more overdressed than him were the police on guard duty, with their police caps and sabers at their waists, the most pathetic little figures. Konrad was sitting on a balcony on the second floor. There was another person sitting about two meters away from him. Papa recognized him: 'Shit, I didn't know Thieck was here.' That's what he said, he said it in German, complete with vulgarity. He was very startled to see that Thieck. He was one of the important men of the Barranquilla colony. He worked at Bayer. He must've stayed at the hotel once or twice, I don't remember anymore, but the important thing is that he was sitting two meters away from Konrad and not a word passed between them, and a place like the Sabaneta really fostered sociability. Anyway, Konrad was there, with his back turned to the other man. We waved to him as soon as we got out of the car, as enthusiastically as possible, and he didn't even lift his hand, as though the newspaper were weighing him down.

"That visit was terrible. The old man was disturbing us all with his unbearable repetition of the same old story: 'I have not done anything, I swear, I am a friend to Colombia and to democracy, I am an enemy of all the dictatorships of the world, I am an enemy of the tyrant, I love this country that has been my host,' et cetera, et cetera. And he showed us a shadow he had under his eye. It seems he had come to blows with someone who dared to speak of Himmler with respect. There was no way to make him shut up for a second, or for him to see a stranger and not immediately leap on him to tell him his woes and convince him of his innocence. It was a lamentable spectacle. And all the time he was carrying that briefcase he carried till his death, he took it everywhere, all around the hotel, and if you weren't careful he'd sit down beside you and take out all the documents concerning his case and show them to you. He'd take out the letters he'd written explaining the misunderstandings, the letters his wife had written, the replies they'd received, the newspaper from the day his name appeared on the list. He carried all that everywhere he went, 'In case I run into a good lawyer by chance,' he said. That time it was our turn; for the old man we were the closest thing to confidants. We were sitting on that balcony, above a climbing bougainvillea, watching the people swimming in the pool and spreading towels on the grass to sun themselves. Our rented paradise, no? Then at some point my father got up to go over to talk to another of the internees, a Jewish man from Cali he knew by name. The old man was speaking in German, as he always did when he spoke of emotions, of feelings, since he felt less vulnerable in his native tongue. 'In these papers there's one thing missing, Sarita. Do you know what that is? I'll let you guess. Go on, guess. I've got everything here, see, things about myself that even I didn't know. Let's see if you knew, Sarita, did you know that I'm connected to platinum traffickers? I bet you didn't, did you? But that's how it is, Cristales Deresser is suspected of collaborating in the trafficking of platinum to Hamburg, ah yes, see what a well-organized business we've set up. The platinum comes from Cali, arrives in Bogota, and by way of Cristales Deresser gets sent to Barranquilla and then shipped to Europe. It seems I'm linked to my associates in Barranquilla by mutual friendship with Herr Bethke. What it is to have friends in common, eh? It's good to be with your own people abroad; the language is our homeland and all that. Let's see what else I have here. . I can always find more interesting documents, this briefcase is infinite. Look, I can tell you that my company is mentioned in letters from the Legation, yes, the Bogota Legation writes to the Lima Legation and mentions me, I must be important. Of course I also have documents that don't mention me but rather my good friends, you know who I'm referring to. El Siglo. November of the year of Our Lord 1943. Yes, we do get the newspapers here, don't think they keep us uninformed. Let's see, under B for Bethke, let's see what the list says, yes, B for Barranquilla. Did you know he was a member of the German Club? Did you know he lives in El Prado? Yes, here in my briefcase I've got all this, but something's missing, can't you guess what it is? I'm going to tell you and don't be startled. It's a letter of farewell.' Then he went from irony to tears. You should have seen him, he seemed like a lost child. 'I don't care if it's written in pencil on a paper napkin, there is no note here that says I'm going. You don't know what that means, arriving home one day and that happens. . Living with someone is many things, one day you'll find out, but one of them is waiting for homecoming time, because everyone has a time they get home, everyone who has a house has a time for coming home to it. It's not a routine, it's something that gradually takes over. I suppose it must be an animal instinct, no? A person wants to get to the place where he's safe, where it's least likely something bad will happen to him.' Enrique had written to him a few days earlier to tell him that Margarita had left. 'One day she didn't come home, Sarita, just like that. How could she do that to her family? I close my eyes and imagine Enrique awake and waiting for her, Sarita, hearing noises, and then the telephone rings and it's her, Sarita, there she is telling her son she's not coming home anymore, that she'll write to me later to say good-bye. Like that, nothing more, she left me a message, she left me a message and she went away, and of course she never did say good-bye, not even a letter of farewell. I don't know where she is, or who with, I don't know what her life's like anymore, I'm never going to know ever again. I pray to heaven nothing like this ever happens to you, Sarita. I wouldn't wish this on anybody.'

"He told me all that. But he didn't stop there. He told me about the first days. They'd been horrifying, he explained. Horrifying the first time the hotel administrator looked at him pityingly after having found out, and then, when everyone at the table must've known, horrifying the first time a letter arrived he didn't immediately recognize. He took it, sure it would be from Margarita, and it turned out to be from the Spanish Embassy, in charge of German assets during those years. They were notifying him of the state of his reserves. When he looked up he noticed that everyone else was watching him, not trying to hide it at all. They'd all stopped playing bridge or reading the paper and were watching him; they wanted to know if Margarita had come back, too. Or rather they knew the letter wasn't from Margarita and they wanted to see poor Konrad's face. 'They were making fun of me. They were laughing behind my back.' Most of the Germans that were held there were people with money, and many could allow themselves the luxury of buying a house in the village so their families could live nearby. For them things were easier. With a permit, which wasn't so difficult to obtain, they could go and sleep in their houses. They had family. They had wives, they had children. Konrad didn't have any of that anymore. 'They all looked at me with pity but inside they were laughing, they were killing themselves laughing, and I'm sure the laughter exploded as soon as I went to my room. The people in this place are the most despicable I've ever had the misfortune to know. Even the Italians, Sarita, even the Italians laugh at me. My disgrace is better than a book for them, I'm their melodrama, I keep them entertained. I'm alone here, Sarita, I don't have anybody.' Everything he would have liked to say to the Committee, to the U.S. ambassador, he said to me in the Sabaneta. And not many could endure that. There was Konrad spewing out his personal tragedy, and there's nothing less bearable than hearing disgraces one hasn't requested. Until I stood up and said, 'I'm sorry, Herr Konrad, I can't stay any longer. I'm going to find my father. We have to go back to Bogota and then on to Duitama. Think of the trip we have ahead of us. I've got work to do, you see, you know what a hotel's like,' and I left, I cut him off in midsentence and I left. It wasn't true that we were going to go back at that time, of course. We were planning to stay the night in a guesthouse in Fusagasuga that a local opportunist had opened for precisely that purpose, because there were lots of families who came from Bogota to see their fathers. We had reserved a room, we were going to return to the Sabaneta the next morning to say good-bye to the old man, but I begged that we should go straight back to Bogota. 'What an ill-mannered girl,' my father said, but I thought something worse: what a cynical girl. I had already started turning that way. Well, cynical and all, I insisted so much that in the end that's what we did. We didn't see Konrad again. After that day, I never visited him again. My father went a couple more times, but I refused. I'm quite sure I couldn't have stood it.

"The worst thing, as you can imagine, is that the old man wasn't exaggerating. Seeing him was pathetic because of his lack of courage, but all that was happening to him was real, it wasn't invented. By the time the war ended and the inmates came out of the Hotel Sabaneta, old Konrad was alone. Without Margarita, of course, and to all intents and purposes without Enrique, who wasted no time in setting up his own place, as if he'd waited his whole life to get rid of his parents. Konrad found that life had left him behind. When he got out, he couldn't sell the family home because it was still held in trust, and the house was eventually auctioned in mid-1946. The money never got to Konrad's pocket, obviously, but rather covered the expenses of his enforced vacation and also war damages, which the government claimed out of the Germans' accounts. I don't know how or when he met Josefina, but she obviously saved his life, or at least helped him postpone his death. Many of the interned left the country. Some returned to Germany, others went to Venezuela or Ecuador to do the same thing they'd been doing in Colombia but starting from scratch, and that made all the difference. Starting over again, no? That's what breaks people, the obligation to start all over again one more time. Konrad, for example, could not. He devoted himself to slowly dying over the course of a year and a half. . I can imagine it perfectly, lying with Josefina as if that woman were a shipwreck's raft, dividing the day between his opera records and coffee and brandy in any old cafe. Yes, the more I think about it the more convinced I am that Margarita did the right thing in leaving him. She died in Cali, in 1980, I think. She remarried, this time a Colombian, after Konrad's death. I think she had two children, a boy and a girl. A boy and a girl who are older than you and probably have their own children by now. Margarita, a grandmother, incredible. Maybe it's cruel to say, but look: What could she have done with that weakling of a husband? Could anyone have believed that Konrad might come out on top eventually? The lists stayed in effect for a year after the end of the war, and during that time Konrad fell to pieces. By the time they were abolished it was too late: the old man was already almost a beggar, but he was by no means the only one. There were those who survived the lists. I knew several. Some were in the Sabaneta, and of those a few really were Nazis. Others weren't even confined to the hotel but went broke the way the old man did. And many of them remade themselves. They never again had the life they'd had before the lists. They never got their money back, and even today they think about those losses. The old man was one of the ones who couldn't. He couldn't manage it. That's the way the world is, divided between those who can and those who can't. So don't talk to me about Margarita's responsibility or anything like that. Sure, she left her family behind, and sure, in some way the old man's suicide has something to do with her. But she managed to live, no? Or does a person get married in order to be a guardian of the weaker one? Margarita had a second life, as your father would say, and that one came out right. With children, with grandchildren. I suppose anybody would like that.

"Of course Margarita didn't come to Konrad's funeral. Understandable, no? After all that had happened, to have to deal with a suicide and a concubine. . Concubine is a pretty word; it's a shame people don't use it anymore. Now they say lover and leave it at that. Concubine, cohabitation, they're pretty, don't you think? They're pretty sounds. Maybe that's why-people don't like that such a pretty word means such a thing. Suicide, on the other hand, isn't pretty. Selbstmord, in German, and I don't like that either. Sure, I say these things as if they're my ideas, when in reality it was your dad who made me appreciate it. We'd only just said good-bye to Josefina when he was already saying to me, 'Concubine sounds better than lover, don't you think? I wonder why that is.' But he said it sadly. Not cold or distant, not at all; not indifferent to everything we'd found out that afternoon, old Konrad's terrible death, the idea of the pain he must have felt, all that. . It made a very deep impression on me. He didn't deserve such a death, I'm quite sure of that, but who says what kind of death we deserve? How is that measured? Does it depend on the good you've done, on your merits, or on what you did wrong, your mistakes? Or is it a balance? You atheists have a really hard time on this one; that's why it's good to be a believer. The arguments I used to have with your dad about this. He always won, I don't need to tell you. For a long time he used to use Konrad as an example. 'The old man turned Catholic, and what good did it do him? You know thousands of Germans who converted in order to get along better in Colombia, to be more accepted by their wives and their mothers-in-law and their friends. And did it help them at all?' And I would say nothing, because it occurred to me, although I could never have proved it, that if old Konrad had remained a Protestant he would have committed suicide all the same. Not just that, he would have committed suicide sooner. I mean, it was his Protestant side that said, Take those pills, get yourself out of this mess. But who can prove that? And anyway, what good would it do, what damn difference would it make?

"That night, after talking to Josefina, we stayed at your dad's house, because it was too late by then even to think about getting back to Duitama. Your grandmother, wrapped in a black shawl as always, made up the bed in the guest room for me. She said hello and looked after me with that sad face that ghosts have in films, while Gabriel went upstairs and locked himself in his room, almost without a word. The house was in Chapinero, above Caracas Avenue. It was one of those two-story houses, with staircases covered in worn red carpeting tamped down with copper rods. I'm not going to say, Shame you never knew it, or anything like that, because that house gave me the creeps. The silliest things made me uncomfortable, like those copper rods and rings that held the carpet in place, or the parrot on the back patio who shouted 'Roberto, Roberto,' and no one knew who Roberto was or where the parrot had got hold of that name. In any case, that night I had a hard time getting to sleep, because I wasn't used to the noise of traffic either. What do you expect, I was a small-town girl; a city like Bogota was a terrible change for me. And in your grandmother's house it was as if everything were working against me, as if everything were hostile. All the furniture in my room was covered in sheets and you could still smell the dust. It was as if the whole house were in mourning, and we had just been talking to Josefina, and all that mixed together. . I don't know, I eventually got to sleep but it was very late. And when I woke up, your father had gone out and come back with the news that Enrique was not at home. 'What do you mean he's not there? Is he lost?' 'No. I mean he's gone. He left everything and went away. And no one knows where.' I asked him who told him and he got impatient. 'The policeman on his block, who heard from the girls who work for the Cancinos. What does it matter who told me? His father has just killed himself, his mother left a while ago, it seems logical that Enrique's gone, too. He wasn't going to stay in that house by himself.' 'But without saying good-bye.' 'Saying good-bye, saying good-bye. This isn't a cocktail party, Sara. Don't be so silly.'

"Then his bad mood passed and we were able to have breakfast in peace, without speaking but in peace, and before noon we caught the train at Sabana Station. It was a foul day, it rained the whole way home. It was raining in Bogota, raining on the way out of the station, raining when we arrived back in Duitama. And all the time I was thinking of reasons someone might have to go away like that, leave everything behind without even saying good-bye to their friends. I didn't say anything because your dad would've been at my throat; he was very upset, you could see that. In the train he pretended to sleep, but I looked at his closed eyes, and his eyelids were moving very quickly, trembling the way a person's eyelids tremble when they're very worried. Seeing him like that made me feel bad. I loved him like a brother then. Gabriel was like a brother to me, and we'd only known each other for about five years, but you see, I stayed at his house, he stayed at the hotel. . always keeping up appearances, of course. I was a young lady with a reputation to take care of, et cetera. But rules were bent as far as they possibly could be, it seems to me. And that's because we were like brother and sister. In the train, when I saw he was pretending to sleep, I fell asleep myself. I leaned my head on his shoulder, closed my eyes, and the next thing I knew Gabriel was waking me up because we'd arrived in Duitama. He woke me up with a kiss on my hair, 'We're here, Sarita,' and I felt like crying, I suppose from so much stress, or from the contrast, no? Stress on one side, affection on the other. Or on one side worry for your father, who might have lost a friend forever, and on the other the way he had of taking care of me as if I had been the one who'd suffered a loss. Yes, I almost burst into tears. But I held them back. I've always been good at holding back tears, always, since I was a little girl. Papa made fun of me until he died of old age. He made fun of my pride, which wouldn't even allow me to look sad or angry in public, let alone cry. A woman crying in public has always seemed to me absolutely pathetic. Yes, sir, that's me: champion at suffering in silence.

"When we arrived at the hotel it was still raining, and the sky was so dark that all the lights were on though it was midafternoon. It was that typical gray sky of Boyaca, you feel like you could touch it if you stood on tiptoes, and the water kept falling as if something had given way up above. Your dad refused to share my umbrella. He let me walk ahead while he got soaked walking behind. I'm sure it had been raining all day there in Duitama, too, because the fountain was full to the brim; at any moment the water was going to spill over the edges. But it was pretty to see the rain hitting the water in the fountain. And even prettier if we were watching it from the dining room, nice and dry and drinking hot chocolate. Papa was there with a guest. He introduced us to him, saying he was Jose Maria Villarreal and that he was just leaving. I immediately knew who he was because Papa had spoken of him several times. "He's a godo to watch out for," he told me once, showing more respect than usual. They'd been seeing a lot of each other because they shared a sort of passion for Simon Bolivar, and Villarreal didn't seem to mind coming from Tunja once in a while to talk about the subject, believe it or not. We exchanged greetings with the godo to watch out for and sat down, Gabriel and I, to warm up our hands with a cup of hot chocolate by the glass door to the dining room. There was a fire in the grate, outside it was still pouring rain, and in the dining room it felt wonderful. Even my father seemed content seeing his friend to the door and probably talking about the Pantano de Vargas or one of those things. He was like a child with a new toy. Incredible, no? Incredible that we were such a short time away from disaster, Gabriel. I think about it and wonder why the world didn't stop at that moment. Who did we have to bribe to get the world to stay still just there, when we were all fine, when each of us seemed to have survived the things that life had thrown at us? Who should we have asked to pull those strings? Or were those strings worn out, too?

"According to what Gabriel told me the next day, in the afternoon, when we were able to be alone for the first time since he woke up from the anesthesia, it happened more or less like this:

"After the hot chocolate he'd gone up to his room with the idea of resting from the train journey and reading a little. In a week or so he had to take his first preparatory exam: all the subjects from civil law in one exam, a sort of continuous firing squad, like being shot and then shot again another ten times. So he opened his books on the desk and began to study the ways to acquire dominion over property, which were at least well-written articles, full of rhetorical devices that on a good day made him laugh out loud. Gabriel's classmates thought he was odd. Those poor guys couldn't understand the humor he found in the stipulations on the gradual and imperceptible subsidence of the waters defined in pure poetry, or the dove that flew from one dovecote to another without any reprehensible guile on the part of the new owner. 'But I couldn't concentrate, ' he told me later. 'I tried to read about the dove and I'd see old Konrad lying on the street vomiting, I'd move on to the gem set in the ring and I'd see Josefina in her sandals, with fresh semen trickling down her leg, and I'd start retching, too. So I stood up, closed my codes and notes, and went out for a walk.' I didn't hear him leave because I was in my parents' room listening to a strange piece of news. Before the beginning of the war, a Hungarian architect had disappeared along with his wife, and someone had just found them in the mountains. There were some tourists walking up in the mountains and a guy came out from somewhere and asked them how the war was going. It seemed he'd fixed up a cave and had spent all that time hidden there. He fished for food and got water from the river. When they told him the war had ended a year and a half ago, he went down to Budapest, went to see his family and returned to his house, but as soon as he arrived he realized he wasn't going to be able to do it. His wife agreed. So they packed up some clothes and utensils and went back to their cave. Papa liked the story. 'I'll bet you anything you like they were Jews,' he said. And while we listened to the rest of the program, Gabriel went downstairs and out for a walk. But before leaving he went to the kitchen and asked for a big pandeyuca to take with him. He told Maria Rosa, the cook, that he'd be back in an hour.

"It was dark by then. Gabriel walked under the balconies and the eaves, dashing from beneath one balcony to the next, from the eaves of one house to the next, trying to stay as dry as possible. But it wasn't raining so hard anymore, and it was pleasant to breathe in the fresh, clean air, it was pleasant to walk through empty streets. 'I turned up my collar,' he said. 'I thought about eating my pandeyuca in two bites so I could put my hands in my pockets, but then I thought it could keep my hands warm since it was fresh from the oven. I was determined to have a good long walk, even if I gave myself pneumonia. It was just so quiet, Sara, I wasn't going to miss it.' It was simply a matter of walking cautiously, taking care not to slip on the paving stones, which were terrible when it rained, and he was focusing all his attention on that. And so, looking down at the ground and walking steadily forward like a horse with blinkers on, with a warm pandeyuca in the pocket of his jacket, he ended up at the plaza, among other reasons because all the streets in a small town like ours lead to the plaza, to such an extent one wonders why they bother giving it a name. Plaza de los Libertadores, the Duitama one's called, but no one in the history of the town has ever had to say the full name. The plaza is the plaza. That day it was all decorated for the recent holidays, images of the baby Jesus hanging on doors and balconies and leaning in the windows of the cafes. And Gabriel walked around the plaza looking in the shop windows and the cafe windows, and inside the cafes a few people were sheltering, most of them farm laborers freezing to death and smelling of wet ponchos. From one of those cafes, where there weren't any peasants but people in ties who worked in the town hall, someone called him, firmly but without raising his voice. It was Villarreal, Papa's friend.

"He asked him what he was doing out there in the rain, if he needed anything. He had his car around the corner, he said, he could give him a lift somewhere. 'He spoke to me so courteously that I immediately forgot the most incredible thing: that he'd called me by name, by my full name, having only heard it once, and only in passing.' But Villarreal was like that with everybody. When Gabriel explained that he was just out for a walk, that he liked strolling at night because there were never any people in the streets in Duitama, Villarreal seemed to understand completely, and he even began to recommend routes to him, not just in Duitama, but also in Tunja and in Soata and in the center of Bogota. He was an extremely cultured man who knew, or seemed to know, the history of every corner. They talked about the church that was still under construction, right there, on the other side of the plaza. 'A few days ago, on a Sunday, I went into the building site to see it from inside,' said Villarreal. 'If it works out as planned, it's going to be bellisima.' Gabriel liked the way he pronounced his double ls, that liquid sound that has been lost; no one pronounces their double ls like that anymore. And maybe it was because of those double ls, or maybe it was Villarreal's manners, but afterward, after they'd said good-bye, Gabriel carried on walking around the edge of the plaza under the eaves and the balconies and the colonial street lamps, which were lit though they didn't cast any light, and he crossed the road and looked around to make sure no one could see him. It was absurd, because going into a building site shouldn't be illegal. 'But when I thought that, it was already too late, I was already inside. And I don't regret it, Sara, I'm not sorry. The nave of a cathedral under construction is a staggering thing to see.'

"He was sheltered by immense walls, but it was colder than outside. It was the dampness of the cement, of course, it was cold cement in his nostrils when he took a deep breath. Near the altar, or near the place where the altar would be, there were two piles of sand as high as a man and a smaller one of bricks, and beside them was the mixer. By the door side were stones, beams, more stones and more beams. The rest was scaffolding, scaffolding everywhere, a seamless monster that went right round the nave and rose up to the windows without their stained glass. There inside, it was as if he'd become color-blind. All was gray and black. And then there was the silence, such perfect silence that Gabriel held back an urge to shout to see if a nave under construction had an echo. 'I felt good,' he told me later. 'I felt calm for the first time in days. Almost blind and almost deaf, that's how I felt, and it was a kind of serenity, as if someone had forgiven me.' He wanted to sit down, but the ground was wet, there were buckets and trowels all over the place, there was unmixed cement and sand, and from one corner came the smell of urine. So he stood. At that moment he remembered the pandeyuca, took it out, pulled off a couple of threads that had stuck to it from his pocket, and began to chew.

"It was cold by then, of course, but it tasted good. Gabriel ate slowly, taking small unhurried bites, trying with all his might not to think about old Konrad's death but about anything else at all, about the taste of cassava and cheese, for example, about the smell of the cathedral cement, about the arrangement of the pews when they put them in, about the pulpit and the priest, about how long it would take to build, and he thought about all that, and then he thought about the hotel, he thought about me, thought he loved me, thought about my father, thought about Villarreal, thought about Bolivar, thought about the battle of the Pantano de Vargas, thought about the name of the plaza, Liberators, and that's where he'd got to when the men appeared. The place was so dark that Gabriel didn't manage to see their faces beneath their hats, and didn't know which one asked him if he was Santoro, the one from Bogota. Maybe the one who asked was the same one who took out his machete first; it seems quite logical. Question, answer, machete. They'd come in through the cathedral door, or rather through the space for the door, so Gabriel had to start running toward the altar, confident he'd be able to escape out of the back of the building site. He slipped on the gravel but didn't fall, he kept running over the loose boards of the scaffolding, but he had to get through between a column and a pile of sand, and when he stepped on the sand his foot sank in and his shoe slipped and Gabriel fell to the ground. He lifted up his right hand to protect himself from the machete blow, but closed his eyes when he saw the blade coming down, and then he didn't open them again.

"When dinner was served in the hotel dining room, Maria Rosa went to look for Mama and asked her what we should do with Don Gabriel's place. Should we wait for him, wasn't he going to be coming? Mama came up to my room and asked me the very same question. I didn't even know Gabriel had gone out, I thought he was still in his room. 'He went out two hours ago. He told Maria Rosa that he wouldn't be long. Why don't you put on a coat and ask her to go with you?' She had already put on a poncho, when I came down, and told me my father had already left. 'I wonder if he got hit by a car, Senorita Sara,' she said. That was just what I was afraid of, and I was not at all pleased to hear that the same idea had occurred to her. Maria Rosa started walking toward the plaza and I went the other way, like when you go to the lake by car. I walked around, asked the few people I saw, but I didn't even know what to look for, where to look, I'd never been in such a situation before. Besides, I was scared. All of Duitama knew who I was, and if so inclined I could go out alone at four in the morning, but that night I was scared. So after a little while I was back at the hotel. Mama was sitting on one of the benches on the patio, in spite of the cold, and told me as soon as I came in that Maria Rosa had found him near the church. 'He was attacked,' she said. 'He's hurt. Your father took him to Tunja; he's there with him now, so don't worry.'

"But she didn't tell me they cut four of his fingers off with a machete. She didn't tell me he'd almost bled to death. Gabriel told me all that the next day, when Papa brought him back to the hotel. He also explained the symptoms of septicemia to me. 'We have to be vigilant,' he said. All that when he was getting better, after the hours he'd spent unconscious. The Duitama doctor came, examined his injury, insisted how lucky we'd been, and I liked that he addressed us in the plural, that he saw us all together. That's how I felt, at least at that moment: I had been maimed as well. Gabriel's hand was bandaged, but just from the shape of the dressing, or rather from the shape of what was under the dressing, I could see how serious the matter was. 'But who did this to you?' I asked him. It was just a manner of speaking, one of those questions you ask just because you do, you know, not expecting a reply. But I was immediately sorry, I felt panic-stricken, because I realized that Gabriel knew who had done that to him and furthermore he knew why. 'No, don't tell me,' I said, but he'd already started talking. 'Enrique sent them,' he said. 'My friend sent them. But don't worry, I deserved it. This and much more. I killed the old man, Sara. I fucked up their lives. It's all my fault.' "